These feminists
are mainly below the age of thirty, many of them born since the fall of the
Berlin Wall. They're reacting in shock at finding the 'equality' and 'liberation'
put about as the birthright of the 21st century woman are little more than a
travesty, that the reality dominating their lives is in-your-face patriarchal
misogyny in an environment of neoliberal capitalism, more exploitative and
greedy year on year. But feminists of this generation know full well that
women's rebellion isn't something new. They are aware of regenerating a
movement that was set back for a while during the nineties and noughties, the
Second Wave feminism of their mothers and grandmothers.

Victoria Showunmi, Betiel Baraka and Sarah Mathewson in a plenary session at the Feminism in London conference 2013. Credit: Cynthia Cockburn

The latest in
what has become a more-or-less annual sequence of mass gatherings since 2008, Feminism
in London 2013, took place at the Institute of Education on 26th
October and drew 750 participants. This conference was notable (in my
perception - others might see it differently) for a larger than usual presence,
alongside the young majority, of women in their middle and older years. And,
whether as cause or effect is not quite clear, the feminist concerns and analyses
presented and discussed this year seemed broader and deeper too.

It was not that
women's anger against male violence and the objectification and exploitation of
women as commodities, a totally necessary rage that has fired up earlier
conferences in this series, was lacking this time. Far from it. Sarah Mathewson
and Betiel Baraki from Object spoke of the campaign
against The Sun's Page 3 and men's
magazines. There were sessions on 'choice', on trafficking, pornography, female
genital mutilation and labiaplasty. Shabina Begum spoke movingly of acid
aggression, showing a disturbing video. But there was also a greater
willingness this year to tangle with the other stuff that fills the daily news
channels: militarism, militarization and war; austerity, privatisation and
welfare cuts; the threatening creep of religious authoritarianism.

One workshop, on antimilitarist feminism, was organised by Rebecca Johnson, of Acronym and Women in Black. Another workshop,
that I was myself involved in staging, took a head-on approach to 'power' with
the explicit aim of extending the range of feminist analysis to concerns that
are characteristic of the left, of socialism, and of movements against
imperialism, nationalism and racism. The title we gave it, hardly a head-turner
you'd think, was Challenging Linked
Systems of Power: Towards a Whole-istic Feminism. Yet the session proved
attractive, with more than 160 women signing up for it.

We were
facilitated by Brigitte Lechner, and beside me on the platform, to give brief
introductions on the theme, were Pragna
Patel of Southall Black
Sisters, Jenny Nelson of Red Pepper magazine, and Ece
Kocabicak of Manchester and Istanbul, who is active in the Socialist
Feminist Collective of Turkey. The room was organized into sixteen tables
with ten participants at each, and most of the time was devoted to small group
discussions around these tables, focused on individual women's experiences of
being at the wrong end of power relations, and on devising collective feminist
strategies of resistance.

What we tried to
do, in providing a starting point for these discussions, was to set out briefly
our own perceptions of how power works.
My own take on it went pretty much as follows. All of us - you, me,
everyone - as individuals have relationships that are complicated by
differences between us. Man/woman,
white/black, owning class/working class. And these distinctions are associated
with advantage and disadvantage. In the last few years, we've learned to call
these cross-cutting inequalities 'intersectional'. They 'intersect' in the sense that each difference (in me, from
others) affects the way the other differences (in me, from others) are
experienced.

But - we don't
just do power to each other as
individuals. We're positioned in
relation to each other by systems of power that go way back in time and span
the globe - the capitalist mode of production; the patriarchal gender order;
the racist nation-state system. As I see it, power relations like this bear on
us in and through, middle-level institutions. Things like multinational
corporations; churches, synagogues and mosques; legal systems; traditional
family structures. And it's not that one kind of institution does one kind of
power. They all do several. That multinational corporation, yes, it's a class
system in which the owners of capital exert power over workers and consumers. But it's also a phallocracy, with men in
the board room and women at the keyboards. Or, we might further observe, white
men in the board room and black, minority and ethnic women at the sewing
machines and cash tills.

So, the way I
see it - the several relations of power
are intersected at the big systemic level, at the mid-level of institutions and
at the individual level of you, me, him, her. That's what we meant in our
workshop title by 'linked systems of power'. You can't tease them apart. They
work in and through each other, bear on and shape each other.

Pragna Patel. Credit: Cynthia Cockburn

What does this
say for the women's movement? I'd argue that, yes, we have to struggle against
systemic male dominance and men's control of our bodies - as we do in radical
feminism. But we need more than that. I asked the room to imagine, for a
moment, that I work in a big hotel chain. Our management is pretty much all men
(as I described it) and us chamber-maids are all women. We can't get either the
management or our trade union to take
seriously our demand for protection as room-staff from sexual abuse by male
clients. We've got a struggle against patriarchy here, and it's not just the
bosses! If the men in our union won't wake up and act against the exploitation
of women by the hotel chain, and furthermore the prioritising of male interests
in the union, we women may need to set up our own union branch. But then again,
the management is trying to put a lot of us workers, men and women, on zero
hours contracts. We need solidarity in this classic struggle against capital.
And - don't think that's the end of it. We've got another fight coming up, on
the race discrimination front. Kitchen cleaning jobs in this hotel are about to
be subcontracted out to a company that profits massively from exploiting
vulnerable migrant labour from south-east Asia.

So what I need
is a strategy of resistance that's feminist, socialist and antiracist. At a
minimum! A women's movement that
doesn't perceive and resist all dimensions of oppression and exploitation is no
earthly use to me, from my perspective as a hotel employee. Nor is a socialism
that isn't feminist and anti-racist. I need a whole-istic movement, a
whole-istic feminism.

The government's
handling of economic crisis and in particular its swingeing cuts of public
sector spending and services is another clear example of the intertwining of
capitalist/class and patriarchal/gender systems. Jenny Nelson quoted the Women's Budget Group report that puts forward
concrete evidence that women are being disproportionately affected by public
sector cuts. Especially as single parents, and often as single pensioners, we
have lost much more than men in benefits and service provision. Jenny proposes
we confront structural inequalities, wherever they show up. 'Let's connect with
existing struggles against the cuts. Let's act in solidarity with one another
here, and with women around the world.'

Ece Kocabicak,
for her part, stressed that we need to get beyond the idea that it's only the
capitalist class that exploits people's labour power, while patriarchy simply
does 'oppression'. Patriarchy is a
system of exploitation too, she argues. Men universally exploit women's labour
power at home, where women work unpaid day and night to service and care for
family members. And, especially in poorer countries, many women are unpaid
production workers within the small-and-medium sized farms and other businesses
owned by their husbands, fathers or other male relatives. Patriarchal
exploitation is systemic, like capitalist exploitation. And the two systems
work together, shape each other. As feminists we can't effectively resist one
without resisting the other.

Ece Kocabicak (left) and Pragna Patel. Credit: Cynthia Cockburn

Pragna Patel is
one of the founders of Southall Black Sisters, a long-lived feminist
organization providing refuge and support for women of BME communities
surviving domestic violence. SBS, she told us, was doing intersectional
politics long before it became a fashionable term. 'It means addressing the
ways different and multiple systems of discrimination and oppression intersect
to reproduce power and privilege.' The left frequently accuse SBS of fuelling
racism by criticizing the patriarchalism of Muslim, Hindu and other communities. They respond that to remain silent would be to
collude in their own oppression. 'Instead, we have to find ways of resisting
all forms of oppression through a politics of alliance-building and solidarity
work that can counter class and gender inequality, racism and other forms of
oppression at the same time.'

What we meant,
then, by this 'whole-istic' feminism our workshop was designed to imagine, was
one capable of responding not just to all phallocratic gender regimes, but to
the equally disastrous capitalist mode of production, despoliator of lives and
resources; and the imperialising, arrogant, racializing dominations inherent in
the nation-state. These globe-spanning systems are each other's environment.
Each takes account of the other, responds to it, uses it, shapes it and is
shaped by it.

Finn Mackay, in her rousing closing
speech to the conferenceput it in a
nutshell. 'There's nothing in politics, in wars, in peace, culture, business,
law, or development that does not touch us as women'. All these places, spaces and processes cry out for feminist
resistance. And in each, make no mistake, we need women-only spaces in which to
organize. Our whole-istic feminist struggle will benefit not only
women-as-women. It will benefit women as workers, women as BME citizens, as
disabled, as elderly. It will besides benefit some people who happen to be
white - the ones exploited by capitalism and patriarchy. It will benefit some
people who are men - the ones most deeply exploited by capitalism and
marginalized by racism. And all the better for that. As Finn said, 'Who wants equality with unequal men?' Or, to quote
Pragna again, 'Ultimately the question for feminists is this: can we achieve
freedom if other women or men are not free?

About the author

Dr. Cynthia Cockburn is a feminist
researcher and writer, honorary professor in Sociology at City University
London, and at the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of
Warwick. She lives in London. Her new book is Looking to London, published this month by Pluto Press.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.
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